The Issue With High School Massacres

A first-degree murder act or attempted murder that involves two or more victims takes place on a school’s grounds qualifies as a school shooting. We regrettably go through terrible and awful events in life. It is so tragic when something like this occurs and young lives are wasted as a result of someone feeling the need to commit suicide by shooting up a school. Everywhere in the globe, school shootings have been committed by people of various ages, genders, and ethnicities. The term “school shooter” refers to a broad category of people who believe it is essential to shoot and murder their classmates. Talking about it is difficult, and even reporting the tragedy is difficult. Those motivated by hatred, those who have been victimized by their superiors, and those out to make our world a hellish place to live murder the lives of young, helpless people. There has been much research and study on this subject to attempt to understand the shooter’s motivations for killing the people he killed.

There are several locations and settings where a school shooting might happen. Shooters throughout high school, college, and adulthood. All school shooters have various mentalities; traumatized shooters generally experienced abuse as youngsters, psychotic shooters typically experience mental illness, and psychopathic shooters believe that their acts are justifiable and that they are benefiting society as a whole. 2016 (space.M)

According to Olweus, a victim of bullying is someone who has been repeatedly exposed to unpleasant behavior by one or more other pupils. It will take time, greater attention to detail, and more knowledge of the indications shown when an adolescent man is being bullied to try to identify teenage boys who are at risk of peer bullying. According to research cited in the Reuter-Rice article, bullied individuals often struggle to make friends and feel more alone than other people do. They also exhibit a lack of social and emotional adjustment to society. Some kids experience bullying as a result of their sexual orientation. In a 2002 study by the National Mental Health Association of 760 teenagers aged 12 to 17, it was found that 78% of those adolescents who identified as LGBT experienced bullying and teasing at school. In terms of understanding the probable reasons of male aggression, little research has been done on the family of the bully and the victim of bullying (school shootings). The male teenagers who were bullied by their peers had a warm, loving connection with their mother. Boys may engage in bullying behavior for one of four reasons: caregiver attitude toward the youngster, acceptance of aggressive conduct, emotional outbursts, and the young boy seeing a strained relationship between both of his parents. Students do not believe that school is a setting where they may feel safe, according to several polls that have been conducted. (2008) Reuter-Rice

Due to how uncommon and dramatic the occurrences are, school shootings are seldom ever “examined.” Because of this, previous research on school shootings has always focused on and around the reasons for the shootings, the victims’ link to the shooters, and the overall number of people they have murdered.

School-related violence, bullying, and estrangement have received much attention as reasons why the offender believes it is essential to start opening fire on school property. Violent media, including first-person shooter video games and violent movies, has been “connected” to potential causes of school shootings. However, since 1980, there have been fewer school shootings as a result of the rise in violent media. Since the 1980s, there have been fewer school shootings despite an increase in violent media, but there has been a substantial rise in multiple victim killings on school grounds (Agnich, L. E. (2015)).

After a school shooting has taken place, there are always many questions about the motive and the reasons why it occurred. When the media learns about a school shooting, they rush to report the story. While this may be helpful in spreading the word, it can sometimes result in inaccurate conclusions about who the “school shooting culprit” is or could be. Research has been done by Fritzon and Brun on a number of variables that might contribute to school shootings, including the home environment, the perpetrator’s behavior, and the atmosphere at school.

Leary (Leary et al., 2003) thinks that a genuine or perceived rejection or the loss of a relationship may be the catalyst for school shootings. Teasing, ostracism (exclusion from a group or community), and romantic rejection are the three types of rejection. Those who believe they are in a hostile atmosphere may become more aggressive in response to tragedies like rejection.

Many times, those responsible for school shootings have mental illnesses. Depression, personality problems, a lack of empathy, and suicide ideation are among the mental illnesses that have been linked to school shooting perpetrators. A school shooter who is depressed is characterized as being very sensitive to criticism, inclined to expect rejection, and always coming across as suspicious of others around them. In a research by Gerard et al. (2015), 28 school shooting culprits were examined, and it was found that 71% of those who were found guilty of the crime had been diagnosed with depression.

According to a research by Pellegrini (Pellegrini et al. 1999), the perpetrator of bullying victimization and violence in general is often the victim of taunts, bullying, and victimization before the event ever occurs. People who commit school shootings are often labeled as “loners.” In addition to feeling depressed and lonely, they also believe they don’t belong anyplace (Ioannou, M., Hammond, & Simpson, 2015).

The youngster who pulls the gun to kill his classmates and/or fellow instructors often has a troubled background and experiences traumatic occurrences prior to the murders. In a school shooting that happened in 1992, a 17-year-old high school student killed a janitor who worked at that school as well as one of his instructors. The 17-year-old came from a troubled family; his father would sometimes beat him up, and his mother was thought to be mentally ill.

Eric Houston, a different high school student, murdered his instructor and three of his classmates in the same year. Eric had to put up with a terrible childhood due to his violent father. Eric experienced biological brain damage as a result of his father’s increasing physical abuse against him. Evan Ramsey fatally shot his teacher and a classmate in 1997. Evan’s mother was an alcoholic who was negligent, and his father was incarcerated. Evan moved around a lot as a youngster, living in foster homes. Evan was bullied by his peers as well because they enjoyed seeing him become upset and agitated. The three youths had experiences of abuse and bullying, which influenced their actions and resulted in the premature death of innocent lives (Warnick, B. R., Johnson, B. A., & Rocha, 2010). Becoming a school shooter might be significantly influenced by peer pressure. The two Columbine shooters that negatively impacted one another were Klebold and Harris. Together, the two intimidated their peers, wore “serial killer” shirts to school, and spent more than a year organizing the Columbine massacre. People who attended to school with Klebold and Harris thought less of them; one of their classmates said the Columbine was a “clean and pleasant environment sans two rejects (Klebold and Harris) most kids did not want them here” (Thompson S., & Kyle K., 2005).

Due to the rise in juvenile violence after 1998, school shootings in the United States have truly captured the attention of the national media. Parents, professors, and students all have a small level of anxiety about going to class one day and discovering a shooting outbreak on their campus due to the rise in youth-related violence that results in school shootings. The FBI began conducting a threat assessment. With all the data obtained on male teenagers, it is impossible to fully create a picture of what and who a school shooter is and can be because there are too many individual variances. 71% of individuals who were found guilty of a school shooting acknowledged that they had been harassed, intimidated, or hurt before striking out and shooting up the building. (2008) Reuter-Rice

The amount of national media coverage that school shootings get and the possibility that the next school shooting may occur on their campus are making students more afraid to remain on campus. More than 187,000 students attending at least 193 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus during school hours, according to a quote from the Washington Post. Those figures alone are unsettling to consider, especially given that the article was published in 2018 and that many more shootings have occurred since then. 2018’s Volume 58, Issue 4, Metuchen

The majority of Americans believe that school shootings are more often than they really are, even while the number of such incidents is still greater than it should be. This is true even when crime rates in the United States are on the decline. The amount of time the media spends on the incident is one reason why Americans think that school shootings occur more often than they really do. School shootings typically take 10 minutes, but the media may continue to cover them for days, weeks, or even months thereafter. In a study of how school shootings are covered in the media on college campuses, researchers found that people grow more afraid and more inclined to believe that something similar would happen again the more media attention they give to a shooting. The authors are Jaymi Elsass, H., J. Schildkraut, and M. C. Stafford (2016).

Compared to other nations, the United States has a substantially greater rate of school shootings. Between 1966 and 2008, there were 44 school shootings in the United States, compared to only seven in Canada and seven in all of Europe over the same period. Out of the 50 states, there were school shootings in 20, 25, and 31 of them between 2013 and 2015, a distressing rise from the previous three years. The number of school shootings climbed over the same three years, along with the number of states where a school shooting took place. There were 154 cases of school shootings from 2013 to 2015, including 35 in 2013, 55 in 2014, and 64 in 2013. The bulk of school shootings that took place between 2013 and 2015 were carried out by male offenders. (B. Kalesan et al. 2017, 2017)

Shooting ranges have been flagged as having a significant risk of lead exposure ever since the 1970s. When you fire a gun at a shooting range, airborne gunpowder fragments are thrown into the air, and you might be exposed to lead by breathing them in. Lead exposure predominantly affects the neurological system and has been connected to diseases including alterations in behavior. According to a research done on 118 participants (87 shooters and 31 archers), the shooters had blood lead levels that were much higher (79.8%) than those of the archers (22.6%). This research also demonstrates that those who visited shooting ranges had blood lead levels that were substantially greater than people who visited archery ranges (Naicker, N et. Al. 2018).

Robert Steinhauser, a 19-year-old student from Erfurt, Germany, returned to the high school he had just been expelled from and killed twelve of the teachers there, two students, a school secretary, and a policeman before he decided to commit suicide. He was armed with a pistol and a shotgun at the time. Following investigations into the school massacre, violent video games including “Soldier of Fortune” and “Quake” as well as a selection of violent movies were found in Steinhauser’s room. Steinhauser’s academic performance began to deteriorate before the school massacre, he joined a local shooting club, and he even started to build up his own personal armory of guns. The reasons Steinhauser’s problems at school began to worsen have been attributed to his passion to and interest in first-person shooting video games.

In Emsdetten, Germany, only about three years after Steinhauser’s school massacre, another youngster, this time equipped with pistols, knives, and improvised explosives, murdered one student and injured 37 others. The media painted the student, 18-year-old Sebastian B, as a loner who carried out his actions to kill as many lives as possible and take as many lives with him. The media’s depiction was based on writings they discovered in Sebastian’s notebooks and online posts. Sebastian said that his life had been wonderful until he began school and that the only thing he had learnt there was that he was a loser. Sebastian was connected to the same first-person shooter video games as Steinahuser as a result of inquiries into his behavior at his former high school.

The German authorities began focusing on violent first-person shooter video games and their link to the massacres carried out by Steinahuser and Sebastian after the horrific school shooting sprees that took place in that country. According to reports, Kretschmer spent a lot of time playing first-person shooter video games, which shows that these games had an impact on the men’s behavior. When it comes to a possible school shooter similar to Steinhauser and Sebastian, the offenders’ violent video games combined with their violent home life and school-instigated violence are a prescription for catastrophe. Steinhauser and Sebastian both played the violent video games, but any one of them may have been motivated to shoot up their schools by a variety of alternative stimuli.

The advertising of violent video and computer games has begun to decline under the German government. One method the German government has taken action against the advertising of violent video and computer games is by beginning to limit sales of such games to children, with the ultimate objective of outlawing the sale of all violent games. The protection of young people legislation, which was developed by German lawmakers, enables them to impose limitations on the sale of video games that may be regarded to be harmful.

Despite how gory and lifelike first-person shooter video games seem, psychologists and social scientists disagree on the topic of whether violent behavior in real life is influenced by video games. The German school shooters shared a passion for first-person shooter video games, according to government authorities, political party members, and certain interest organizations. They argue that playing these violent video games increased the shooters’ aggression when they weren’t playing them. N. Diamond (2013). It’s a step in the right direction that Germany is aiming to limit access to online killing games.

In order to stop additional school shootings from occuring, more study into this issue is required. Not only in the United States, but all throughout the globe, there have been far too many school shootings.